God Is Dead (16 page)

My mother has started going out again, doing some light shopping, having her hair done. She went to her cribbage group one time, but says she won't anymore.

The trees are bare and my parents' yard is covered with a thick layer of leaves. The leaves were bright orange and red and yellow but have been lying around for a while and are all gradually becoming the same dark brown color, from rain and rot. A section of vinyl siding has come loose from the corner of their house and flaps back and forth in the November winds, slapping against the wall. A week ago someone tossed a rock through a window on the second floor and the pane hasn't been replaced. I patched the hole with a piece of particle board to keep the cold out, and no one, not me or my mother or my father, said a word about why someone might have done it. I prefer to think it was marauding kids, still jazzed up from Halloween and looking to cause trouble. So that's what I think.

One night Melissa is having her nightmares and the only sound in the house is her whimpering and crying and I do it—I get up off the sofa and go to her in the bedroom. I sit down carefully on the bed next to her. The room is dark except for silvery moonlight filtering in through the window but I can see some of her hair is clinging, tangled and thick with sweat, to her face, and I brush it away gently with just two fingers.

Lissa, I say to her, it's all right, baby. It's okay.

I say, It's me, Lissa. Nothing's changed, honey, it's just me, same as always.

Wake up now, I say. C'mon Lissa, wake up, baby.

She doesn't wake, but her crying stops and she nestles against my thigh in her sleep. I put a hand on her head. I watch the moon make its way slowly past the window. It's like watching the hour hand on a clock. I am very careful not to move.

My brother's trial lasts only four days. He is found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to the state mental hospital in Augusta. Soon after, most people around town go on with their lives and forget about him and what he did. Every time they see me, though, their eyes flash, and they're reminded.

Winter comes. The first snow turns my parents' yard from brown to thick, pure white, and thankfully it stays. The flap of siding still hangs loose and the window on the second floor is still broken, but with the snow things don't look so bad.

My mother makes plans to go to Florida for the winter. She meets with a travel agent a few towns away and calls a realtor in Palm Beach. Every morning she pesters my father until he showers and puts on pants and shoes and a clean oxford. I don't have to do their shopping or run errands for them anymore; my mother does these things again. She goes from place to place with her head up and her back straight and stiff.

Melissa and me have been sharing our bed again for a while. One night she asks me to make love to her.

Are you sure? I ask.

I think so, she says. I need to try. I need to know.

I roll onto my side and face her. I put a hand on her bare shoulder and feel her start underneath my touch. I move on top of her and she kisses me, over and over, quick and desperate. She is trembling beneath me. When I move my hands to her face her cheeks are wet. She kisses me and her tears pour down warm over my knuckles.

Afterwards we lie apart on either side of the bed.

How could he have done that, Jim? Melissa says, and she is still crying a little. To those poor women?

My parents are gone. I helped them close up the house, and they left three days ago for a condo in Palm Beach.

Melissa is gone. She went up north, to her father's place in Presque Isle, where she will be snowed in and safe until April. She said she will be back sometime. It's not over, she said. I just need to get away for a while.

Tonight I drive to Augusta through a blizzard. The speed limit on the interstate has been dropped to 45 because of the weather. I can't see beyond the scrim of thick heavy snowflakes illuminated by my headlights, and it takes nearly an hour to cover the twenty miles there.

I am going to see my brother. There is something I need to do, to relieve me, and Melissa, and my parents, and my brother, of the burden his crime has become. For this I've brought my blackjack, another gift from my grandfather, an iron dowel wrapped like a sausage in scuffed leather. My grandfather used it to crack the heads of rowdy GIs when he was an MP in the army. Because it is deadly, the blackjack has been illegal for years, but I've kept it as a memento. And now I have a use for it.

There is something else I need from my brother, something I have to ask him, something I need to know. A few days ago, after my parents left and I went back to my empty house, I sat down on the sofa and put my head back and fell into a doze. Through the haze of sleep came something which felt like memory: I was a boy of six or seven, in an overgrown field behind the abandoned fire station near my childhood home. A friendly wrestling match with another boy, an older, stronger boy, had suddenly turned serious. I was pinned down; I could feel the sharp broken reeds of the straw grass pricking my back through my shirt. One hand held me down at the shoulder, another hit me repeatedly across the face, clumsily, flailing, but hard enough to draw blood from my lip. I squirmed and pushed but could not throw the older boy off of my chest, and so I cried, and even though this was the only thing left to me, the only thing the older boy could not keep me from doing, I still felt shame even through my fear.

And then my brother, who was much bigger and stronger than the older boy, appeared seemingly out of nowhere. He wound the fingers of one large hand into the boy's hair and lifted him. For a moment the boy hollered and squinted against the pain, reaching up blindly to grasp my brother's wrist, and then his cries were cut short by the impact of my brother's other hand, balled into a great fist, against his nose. Blood exploded from the boy's face like the bursting of a water balloon, and he went down, and my brother straddled his chest and now the older boy was the one crying and begging for mercy, while my brother spoke frightening words over and over in a voice I did not recognize, and even though my brother beat him badly enough to scare me and would not stop even when I screamed and pulled at his shirt there was a part of me, still is a part of me, that felt glad and proud to have a brother so big and strong and loyal, a brother I could count on.

But when I came to fully on the sofa, in the empty house, with Melissa gone, my parents gone, I couldn't tell whether this was just a dream or if it had really happened long ago. It bothered me, that I couldn't tell. As the days passed and the memory/dream persisted, grew stronger and more vivid, it bothered me more, until I finally decided this afternoon to go see my brother and ask him if he remembers.

I pull cautiously off the interstate and follow the signs to the mental hospital. The streets are empty except for the big orange plow trucks, sweeping snow off to the side of the road and spitting sand in their wake. All the traffic lights are blinking yellow. I pass through them steadily, without touching the gas or the brake.

The hospital is set back maybe two hundred yards from the road. I pull off to the side and get out of the car and look down on the grounds. I'm surprised to see there are no walls, or fences topped with razor wire. From this distance the hospital could easily be mistaken for a small college campus. There are six or seven large brick buildings, well lit by orange floodlights. Most of the windows are dark; only a few, here and there, have lights on behind them. A pickup truck is plowing the long narrow driveway that leads down from the main road to the hospital proper.

I light a cigarette. The snow is coming harder now, driven by a gusting wind, and I have to squint to keep it out of my eyes. I smoke and look at the hospital and the river, black and frozen, behind it.

I remember the sun, hot and fat over the field, and the face of the older boy drifting in and out of the sun, like an eclipse, as he flailed at me.

With one finger I flick the cigarette away into the wind, then get back in the car. I check my watch. Visiting hours start in fifteen minutes. I put the car in drive and turn onto the hospital access road. I make my way slowly, tires crunching over the sand laid down by the pickup truck. The driver of the truck sees me coming and pulls over to let me pass.

I follow the signs to the main entrance, park the car, and go inside through an automatic door. The door slides closed behind me with a hiss, shutting out the wind and snow. The entryway is still, quiet, and shockingly warm. A guard in a dark blue uniform sits at a desk behind a thick plate of glass, eyeing me without much interest.

I approach the guard and tell him, through the speaker in the glass, that I am here to visit my brother.

He's a patient here? the guard asks.

Yes, I say.

Name?

I tell him my brother's name. He nods and places a clipboard and a pen in a sliding drawer on his side of the glass, then pushes the drawer through.

Fill that out, he says. He looks at the clock behind him. You can't come in for another ten minutes.

I nod and sit in one of the chairs lined up against the wall. The paperwork on the clipboard asks for my personal information, relationship to the patient, and reason for visit. There is also a disclaimer freeing the hospital of any liability if I am injured or killed. I smile to myself as I sign this in triplicate.

I bring the clipboard and the pen back to the desk and slide them through the drawer to the guard. He takes the clipboard out and sets it aside without looking at it. The pen he leaves in the drawer. I shove my hands into my pants pockets and cough a little.

Two minutes, the guard says without looking up.

I remember the high electric whine of a thousand grasshoppers. The taste of dirt and blood mingling in my mouth.

I wait the two minutes. When they have passed, the guard reaches under his desk and presses a switch hidden from my view. A loud electric buzzing sounds in the door on my right. The guard motions for me to open the door, which I do. I stand on the threshold, holding the door to keep it from closing and locking again, while the guard tells me where to go. When he has finished, I pass through.

Follow the corridor all the way down, he said. On this level the patients are allowed to move about freely. Some of them may talk to you, may even say something nasty or threatening. Just ignore them. Sure they smell bad and are strangely and sometimes only partially dressed. Some even look dangerous. Don't be fooled; they're harmless. All the same, keep walking. Don't stop for any reason. On the other hand, do not—I repeat, do
not
—run. When you reach the end of the corridor you'll find an elevator. Take this to the seventh floor. It will be dark in the elevator when the doors close, and it may seem rickety going up, but don't worry. If you're claustrophobic, keep it together; the ride to the seventh floor only lasts a few moments. When the elevator comes to a stop and the doors open, take a left and follow this corridor until you find the nurses' station. Don't worry about the patients here; on this level they're all locked in their rooms and supervised around the clock.

I follow the guard's instructions. At the nurses' station on the seventh floor a thin man in starched whites has me fill out more paperwork.

I remember my shirt tearing at the shoulder. A rock, half-exposed in the ground beneath me, jammed against the small of my back.

That's
your brother? the man asks when I hand him the completed form.

Yes, I say.

Boy, has
he
been a handful, the man tells me. We've got only one orderly who can handle him. And he's out of work for at least a
week.

Where is he? I ask, though I'm not really interested.

Yesterday we were taking your brother for a bath, the man says. We passed by the breakfast cart, and your brother took hold of one of those heavy plastic coffeepots and
smacked
Little John right in the chops with it. Broke his nose in
two places.

The man laughs and shakes his head. I don't know what to say. So I say nothing.

I remember the tears coming, flowing. How I cried, afraid and ashamed, with a mouth full of blood and dirt, in the field under the hot sun, while a thousand grasshoppers buzzed in unison and the thin broken reeds and exposed rock pricked and stabbed.

Any
way, the man says, motioning for me to follow him, that's why we're keeping your brother down here, in the
isolation room
. Danger to himself and others. We've had to dope him up pretty damn
good,
so don't expect him to carry on much of a conversation.

The man stops in front of the last door at the end of the hallway. The door is solid and windowless except for a small sliding partition at eye level. The man raps on the door three times with his knuckles, then calls to my brother and announces that he has a visitor. He slides a key into the keyhole and gives it two full turns. The tumblers roll inside the lock with a heavy metallic crack that resonates in the corridor, and then the door is open.

Go on, the man says to me. Don't worry. He's in restraints, and I'll be watching. The man slides the partition open to let me know what he means.